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Critics set off opera firestorm

Tara Erraught as Angelina performs during the dress rehearsal of the Rossini opera La Cenerentola in 2013 at the state opera in Vienna. Some critics have praised her voice but slammed her appearance.Photo: Dieter Nagl/AFP/Getty Images

LONDON — The fat lady sang gorgeously — but she was not gorgeous to the eye.

Such was the verdict of London critics attending Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught’s recent debut at one of the world’s most prestigious opera houses.

And their comments have set off a firestorm of controversy internationally.

“She is a chubby bundle of puppy fat,” fumed the Financial Times’s Andrew Clement, who went on to suggest the Glyndebourne Festival had no business casting Erraught in the role of the seductive cavalier Octavian in its new production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.

His views were echoed by other music critics who variously described Erraught’s onstage presence as “dumpy” and “stocky.” Within hours, their damning attacks were sparking angry responses from both opera lovers and performers.

Canadian bass-baritone Trevor Bowes, who is appearing in the Glyndebourne production with Erraught, was one of the first to protest the assault by critics on his colleague’s physical appearance. He suggested her detractors were the equivalent of “perverted” schoolboys.

“The hideous, immature, low-life trash that we saw hurled in the name of music criticism could have landed on anyone,” the Victoria-born Bowes argued in an open letter that has received wide circulation. “I am so deeply angry it happened to a radiant, beautiful performer bubbling with talent and technique.”

The current uproar marks the latest chapter in the continuing debate over whether it’s proper for critics to attack a performer’s physical appearance in assessing a performance. The London Daily Mail’s theatre critic Quentin Letts weighed into the argument, snorting his disdain over any suggestion that the attacks on Erraught were sexist.

“How ridiculous!” Letts said. “Apart from the fact that Miss Erraught indeed looks as though she’s been at the biscuit barrel, the critics called it as they saw it. That is what they are there for.

“Miss Erraught may indeed have a good voice. Let it be heard on radio. But if she is going to perform in opera, she is going to be judged on her looks as well as her voice.

“If Octavian is played by a roly-poly with a bad hairdo, suspension of disbelief becomes tricky.”

A defiant Letts noted that he considers it his duty as a critic to “frequently refer to actors’ waists, hairlines, height, age and so forth.” He remains unrepentant about a notorious 2007 interview mocking Jessica Lange’s physical appearance in The Glass Menagerie. Back then, he said Lange’s “flattened, weirdly symmetrical face” had “some of the characteristics of a spatchcocked quail.”

Bowes told Postmedia News that Erraught’s much-criticized hairpiece has been “redressed to look more like a classic men’s hairstyle.”

In an email message written from backstage at Glyndebourne’s opera house, Bowes said the only reason he wrote last week’s open letter was “to support Tara and her family who were upset by the reviews and the ensuing furor” and that his letter was the only comment she had read on the matter. “She wisely shut down her computer and paid no attention when this began.”

Bowes also said Erraught is continuing to sing superbly.

“I am currently backstage in costume waiting to go on …. Tara is singing beautifully today, undaunted by the nastiness of the whole hoo-ha.”

The New York Times entered the fray, with its senior critics suggesting reviews shouldn’t become so preoccupied with appearance. The Times’s Anthony Tommasini cited a 1950 video of Renata Tebaldi and Jussi Bjorling in La Boheme, saying it didn’t matter that she looked like a “middle-aged, well-fed Italian lady” and that the “stocky” Bjorling resembled a “Stockholm banker” — when they started to sing, their Mimi and Rodolfo became “the essence of youthful desire.”

But Tommasini’s Times colleague, Corinna da Foncesca-Wollheim, contended that Glyndebourne’s particular approach to Der Rosenkavalier would confront a performer like Erraught with significant challenges.

As Octavian, Erraught is a woman playing a boy who at one point dresses up as a girl. And at one point Octavian becomes the lover of the aristocratic Marschallin, sung at Glyndebourne by the willowy Kate Royal, first glimpsed by the audience showering in the nude. Francesca-Wollheim delicately suggests that physically Erraught would have a tough time fulfilling the fantasy image of male audience members imaging themselves as Royal’s fantasy lover.

Another Daily Mail writer, Simon Heffer, concedes that Erraught “suffers by comparison with her lover, played by Kate Royal, who is lissom and appears stark naked at the beginning ….”

But Heffer still comes gallantly to her defence.

“Even so, Miss Erraught sings fabulously, which is all that matters to some of the more old-fashioned of us.”

Meanwhile the debate rages on.

“Clearly, overt sexism is still rife,” mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson commented. “How have we arrived at the point where opera is no longer about singing but about the physique and looks of the singers?”

In North America, some opera and theatre critics have been relentless in attacking performers for the way they look physically. A few years ago, Chita Rivera’s final appearance in the musical Chicago sparked a blunt response from a Globe and Mail critic who minced no words in explaining why the legendary entertainer was too old for the role of a notorious 1920s showgirl.

Former New York magazine critic John Simon repeatedly let loose on Liza Minnelli, describing her presence in Cabaret this way: “Plain, ludicrously rather than pathetically plain, is what Miss Minnelli is. That turnipy nose overhanging a forward-gaping mouth and hastily-retreating chin, that bulbous cranium with eyes as big (and as inexpressive) as saucers: Those are the appurtenances of a clown — a funny clown, not even a sad one.”

Simon was notorious for his personal attacks — and on one occasion received a messy comeuppance. Actress Sylvia Miles, one of his targets, spotted him in a Manhattan restaurant, walked over and promptly dumped a plate of pasta over Simon’s head.